The Rhetoric of Reaction

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The Weblog: Single Post View: There are some central rhetorical strategies I've noticed that seem to be closely associated with the right wing. In the spirit, though not precisely the style, of Mark Kaplan's "Notes on Rhetoric," I'd like to catalogue a few of them here:

• Obsessive focus on minor details...
• A deep concern that politicians' motives must never be questioned...
• A total disregard for context or history...
• Being "willing to be convinced" -- but only if the conservative's opponent can provide a thorough, definitive, and bulletproof argument on the spot.... [T]he conservative reserves the right to make a definitive decision after reading a single book, preferably of fewer than 200 pages.
• General principles to be distilled from this:
  • Radical abstraction -- every fact and person is to be treated in almost complete isolation, with a huge burden of proof on the one who presumes to recognize a pattern
  • The "blank slate" -- the topic at hand is to be treated as though no one in the history of humanity had ever discussed it before this discrete occasion.
  • The pose of open-mindedness -- but his finger is poised on the garage door opener of his mind...